Friday, November 18, 2005

Note to fellow bloggers

Yesterday, MDE shared with us some potential legal problems over an image. MDE may be facing a lawsuit over the use of said image.

Because Intellectual Property Law is a legal topic with which I have much interest, I thought I'd give my readers and my fellow bloggers at Inside Minnesota Politics a quick lesson in Fair Use. Now I'm not a lawyer, but I think this is how it works.

“Fair use is a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism." (Source, Stanford University, 2003)

I believe MDE was providing commentary on the actions in the image. He did source it as well, so there really isn't much for Inside Minnesota Politics to complain about. Besides, if they had a problem with it, they should have asked MDE to take it down before wasting money on a lawyer.

1 Comments:

It is fair use.... A while back Southwest Journal sent STRIDE a cease and descist letter regarding the use of their image. In that case STRIDE had taken a photo from SWJournal and alterned it. The photo was Tom Johnson from Smith Parker - the photo became Tom Johnson with horns.